FutureFest Speakers
We are currently in the process of locking down speakers for this exciting project and you can expect this page to be updated in the near future.
If you are interested in speaking at this event please contact James Vincent (Life/Machine) or Marcie Bell (Earth/Communication) using the details on our Contact Us page.
Speakers - [Please Select]
Full Listing: prev Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 next or View by Theme: Earth - Communication - Life - Machine
Janne Kyttanen
Hermann Hauser
Atsuo Takanishi
Eugene Polzik
Mitchell Tseng
Richard Cotton
Jurgen Borlak
Mary Archer
Frank Piller
Franny Armstrong
Danny O'Brien
Mahender Singh
Phil Guest
Sylvain Lehmann
J.C. Herz
Vinay Gupta
Janne Kyttanen
Founder, Freedom of Creation
Theme: Machine
If there is a single designer associated with rapid prototyping technology it’s Janne Kyttanen of Freedom of Creation (FOC). Some of the world's most innovative design now available is available thanks to rapid prototyping and rapid production (a.k.a. digital manufacturing) and Janne is one of the pioneers.
Janne Kyttanen was born 1974 in Hameenlinna, Finland. He started his industrial design studies at the Escola De Disseny, Elisave in Barcelona -96. He then moved to The Netherlands to continue his studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. He graduated in the spring 2000 from the same Academy.
Right after his graduation he was offered a position as a freelance designer and 3D visualizer at one of the leading industrial design bureaus in The Netherlands, SDA. During his 2 year stay at SDA, he was involved with work for clients in the banking, public transport, aviation, consumer electronics and cosmetics industries.
During his studies Janne proved the potential of using Rapid Prototyping techniques as manufacturing tools and introduced a line of Augmented Reality based Rapid Manufactured products as his thesis for graduation. The project was sponsored by the Human Interface Laboratory, of the University Of Washington and the European leader in Rapid Prototyping, Materialise.
At the Salone Internationale Del Mobile 2003 in Milan, for Freedom Of Creation, Janne designed the first animated 3-Dimensionally printable lights as well as the first economical series of lights produced in this manner. For Milan he also co-designed a variety of products with Jiri Evenhuis using the patent pending 3-Dimensionally printable textiles.
Hermann Hauser
Co Founder, Amadeus Capital Partners
Theme: Communication
Hermann co-founded Amadeus Capital Partners in 1997. In his long and successful history as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, he has founded or co-founded companies in a wide range of technology sectors. These include Acorn Computers, Active Book Company, Virata, Net Products, NetChannel, and Cambridge Network Limited. He was a founder director of IQ (Bio), IXI Limited, Vocalis, SynGenix, Advanced Displays Limited, Electronic Share Information Limited and E*Trade UK.
Hermann holds an MA in Physics from Vienna University and a PhD in Physics from the Cavendish Laboratory at King's College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Academy of Engineering and an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Hermann holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Bath, Loughborough and from Anglia Polytechnic, and was awarded an Honorary CBE for ‘innovative service to the UK enterprise sector' in 2001. In 2004, he was made a member of the UK Government's Council for Science & Technology.
Atsuo Takanishi
Waseda University, Japan
Theme: Machine
ATSUO TAKANISHI is a Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Waseda University and a concurrent Professor and one of the core members of the HRI (Humanoid Robotics Institute), Waseda University.
He is a member of Robotics Society of Japan (a board member in 1992 and 1993), Japanese Society of Biomechanisms, Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineers, Japanese Society of Instrument and Control Engineers and Society of Mastication Systems (a major board member from 1996 to current), IEEE and other medicine and dentistry related societies in Japan.
He received Best Paper Award (Application) IEEE/RSJ IROS2003, JSME Distinguished Research Activity Award in Robotics and Mechatronics in 2003, the Best of Asia Award from BusinessWeek Magazine in 2001, the Finalist of Best Paper Award in ICRA1999 from IEEE and RSJ in 1999, the ROBOMECH Award from RSJ and Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1998 and the Best paper Award from Robotics Society Japan(RSJ) in 1998.
Eugene Polzik
Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen
Theme: Communication
The aim of his research in teleportation is not to achieve the facility to ’beam up’ a person from one planet to another as it happens in science fiction. It is to develop the quantum communication-network of the future, based on information-teleportation - an entire new form of communication-network that will be able to transport much larger quantities of information in a completely safe way. Hard to say how far off the technology but in a year it will certainly be closer to (virtual) reality.
Mitchell Tseng
Chair, Professor and Director, Advanced Manufacturing Institute, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Theme: Machine
Professor Mitchell M. Tseng joined the HKUST faculty as the founding department head in 1993 after working in industry for almost two decades. The focus of Professor Tseng's research are designs of effective systems to serve business and public needs. Based on the insights of designing mechanical and electronic systems as well as the industrial experiences of integrating information systems for business applications, Professor Tseng attempts to develop a new approach for designing systems that are economical, adaptive and responsive to needs.
Richard Cotton
Genomic Disorders Research Centre, Melbourne
Theme: Life
Prof Cotton has written two books entitled "Mutation Detection", initiated the journal entitled "Human Mutation". In 1996 he started a worldwide initiative (The HUGO Mutation Detection Database Initiative, recently formed into the Human Genome Variation Society (HGVS); www.hgvs.org) to capture and distribute lists of mutations.
In June 2006, co-sponsored by WHO, he initiated the Human Variome Project (www.humanvariomeproject.org). This project aims to collect worldwide genetic variation and its associated phenotype. He is Treasurer of the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) and the author of over 200 scientific papers and three patents.
Jurgen Borlak
Director, Fraunhofer Institute of Toxicology and Experimental Medicine in Germany
Theme: Life
Professor Jurgen Borlak is Director of Fraunhofer Institute of Toxicology and Experimental Medicine in Germany. In future, drugs will become even safer and have fewer side effects. In addition, thanks to studies on the genetic variability of a patient, we will be able to predict certain side effects with a high degree of accuracy. In the long run, this will facilitate personalized drug therapy.
Mary Archer
Scientist and Chair, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Theme: Life
Baroness Archer taught chemistry in the University of Cambridge for ten years before developing a wider portfolio of interests. She became a non-executive director of Addenbrooke's NHS Trust in 1993, vice chairman of the Trust in 1999 and chairman in 2002. She also chairs the East of England Stem Cell Network and is a trustee of the UK Stem Cell Foundation.
Frank Piller
Chair professor of management, Technology & Innovation Management Group, RWTH Aachen University
Theme: Machine
Frank Piller is a chair professor of management at the Technology & Innovation Management Group of RWTH Aachen University, Germany, one of Europe's leading institutes of technology. He is also a founding faculty member of the MIT Smart Customization Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Before entering his recent position in Aachen in March 2007, he worked at the MIT Sloan School of Management (BPS, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group, 2004-2007) and has been an associate professor of management at TUM Business School, Technische Universitaet Muenchen (1999-2004).
His research focuses on value co-creation between businesses and customers/users and the interface between innovation management, operations management, and marketing. Frequently quoted in The NYT, Financial Times, The Economist, and Business Week, amongst others, he is regarded as one of the leading experts in the fields of mass customization and customer centric value creation.
As a founding partner of Think Consult, a management consultancy, he helps his clients to serve their customers better by using truly customer-centric strategies. Frank Piller has consulted and delivered executive workshops for more than fifty companies. In addition, he is a frequent corporate speaker and keynote presenter at various conferences. As a member of the board of directors of several innovative companies like corpus-e, Selve, or My Virtual Model, he strives to transfer his research insights into practice and to provide creative input and feedback to these companies on how to build a profitable business by serving their customers individually.
Franny Armstrong
Film Producer/Director
Theme: Earth
Franny is an up and coming film producer/director whose first documentary, 'McLibel', was released to great critical acclaim in 1997. More recently, she directed "The Age Of Stupid" (formerly known as 'Crude') - an ambitious drama-documentary-animation hybrid starring Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite as an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching "archive" footage from 2007 and asking: why didn't we stop climate change while we had the chance? The film is due for release this summer at Cannes.
Franny's films are produced through Spanner Films, an independent TV production company, based in London, which she founded in 1999. Working entirely outside the mainstream TV industry, her films have now been seen by a total of 49 million people.
Franny has spoken at more than 80 film festivals, seminars and colleges around the world. She has been interviewed for TV news and chat shows (inc BBC and ABC Australia) and written articles for books, newspapers and magazines (inc The Guardian).
Danny O'Brien
International Outreach Coordinator, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Theme: Communication
Journalist, IT analyst and broadcaster, Danny O'Brien is a technology columnist for the Sunday Times and Irish Times. Working as a consultant, he has helped formulate online strategies for Intel, the Guardian, and Channel Four, and was responsible for creating Virgin Net's community programming during its startup phase. Danny's broadcast work production and presenting shows for shows for the BBC, Channel Four, Sky and ITV networks. He was the founding editor of Need To Know http://www.ntk.net/>, a weekly British industry newsletter which received a special commendation by BAFTA for its contributions to newsgathering. He is a co-founder of the Open Rights Group, a British advocacy organization, and works at the Electronic Frontier Foundation as their International Outreach Coordinator. He lives in San Francisco.
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Mahender Singh
Research Director, Supply Chain 2020
Theme: Machine
Dr. Mahender Singh is a Research Director for the MIT Supply Chain 2020 Project, a multi-year research effort looking into the future of logistics and supply chain management. His research and teaching focus on operations and supply chain management, with particular interest in exploring the underlying structure of complex supply chains.
Dr. Singh has over ten years of experience in the field of supply chain management and has worked on multiple global supply chain projects to analyze and redesign planning systems. He has taught Operations Management at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he received his Ph.D.; he is also a graduate of MIT-CTL's Master of Engineering in Logistics Program.
Phil Guest
Director, Habbo
Theme: Communication
Phil is Director for Habbo, Europe, one of the world's largest and fastest growing virtual worlds for teenagers with 100 million registered avatars in 32 countries on six continents.
Habbo, which attracts over 9.5 million unique visitors every month, is the main product of Helsinki based Sulake Corporation whose aim is to build Habbo into a new type of youth brand, which is anchored in the world's largest online youth community. The Habbo brand has already been extended to include mobile games and content, animation as well as merchandising products.
Phil joined Sulake in 2007 from AOL where he headed up the Commercial Development team. Previously he was Commercial Director (Europe) for Fox Kids TV network, working across TV advertising, online licensing and programming.
Sylvain Lehmann
Head of the Department of Celular and Molecular Pathology, CNRS Institute of Human Genetics and of the Montpellier Clinical Proteomics Platform in France
Theme: Life
Prof. Sylvain Lehmann, was trained as an M.D. and a Ph.D. He was the recipient of a Howard Hughes fellowship for physician and spent four years in Washington University, School of Medicine, St. Louis MO, USA. His initial training was in molecular and cellular biology and he became interest in clinical biology and cell therapy through its position as a Professor of Biochemistry at the Medical School of Montpellier, France.
His clinical laboratory is working in the biobanking and proteomics fields, looking at biomarkers for the diagnosis and follow up of neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease. This area of clinical research is of major importance as currently more than 5.7 million Europeans suffer from neurodegenerative disorders. Due to the ageing population in the industrial world, this number is expected to increase forming one of the major public health and medical challenges of the upcoming century. Incidentally, no curative therapies are yet available for neurodegenerative disorders, and an other focus of Prof Lehmann's research is on gene and cell therapy applied these diseases. Hence, his laboratory carries out pre-clinical programs using embryonic and neural stem cells with the ultimate goal to replace damaged neuronal cells and to deliver therapeutic molecules intracerebrally.
J.C. Herz
National Academy of Science's Standing Committee on Technology Insight (TIGER)
Theme: Communication
J.C. Herz is a technologist with a background in biological systems and computer game design. Her specialty is massively multiplayer systems that leverage social network effects, whether on the web, mobile devices, or more exotic high-end or grubby low-end hardware.
J.C. currently serves on the National Academy of Science's Standing Committee on Technology Insight (TIGER) and was a member of the National Research Council's committee on IT and Creative Practice. She served on the National Science Foundation's Federal Advisory Committee for Education, and is currently a Fellow of Columbia University's American Assembly. In 2002, she was designated a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum. She is a member of the Global Business Network, and is a founding member of the IEEE Task Force on Game Technologies. J.C. is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Academics: Prior to moving to Washington DC, J.C. taught at the graduate level at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. She has lectured at Stanford, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, the Naval Strategic Studies Group, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and has spoken at the Technology Entertainment & Design (TED) conference, PC Forum, SIGGRAPH, and the Aspen Institute. She serves on the advisory board of the University of Southern California's Center for Creative Technologies, a research center funded by the Army to explore technologies of mutual interest to the military and the entertainment industry. She is on the advisory board of Carnegie Mellon's ETC Press. J.C. graduated from Harvard with a B.A. in Biology and Environmental Studies, magna cum laude, in 1993. She was a coxswain on the Harvard men's rowing team.
Publications: J.C. is the author of two books, Surfing on the Internet (Little Brown, 1994), an ethnography of cyberspace before the web, and Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Little Brown, 1997), a history of videogames which traces the cultural and technological evolution of the first medium that was born digital, and how it shaped the minds of a generation weaned on Nintendo. Her books have been translated into seven languages. As a New York Times columnist, J.C. published 100 essays on the grammar and syntax of game design between 1998-2000. She has also contributed to Esther Dyson's Release 1.0, Rolling Stone, Wired, GQ, and the Calgary Philatelist.
Vinay Gupta
Co Founder of the Global Swadeshi Movement,
Theme: Earth
Vinay Gupta is a long term international policy strategist focussing on the transformative power of free and open source appropriate technology systems. He is a close student of Buckminster Fuller and Mahatma Gandhi, and seeks to help people transform their lives at an economic and political level through greater individual self-sufficiency. The crux of this work is bringing integrated appropriate technology solutions to the poorest through designing systems they can use, understand, and afford.
Vinay is best known for the Hexayurt Project, a simple free shelter design which is suitable for mass production after disasters. He has also worked on energy policy and in a variety of roles in the computer industry. A Scot of Indian extraction, Vinay sees his role as being to help cherry pick the best solutions to long term global problems and push them into broad adoption.
He is one of the founders of the Global Swadeshi Movement, a group working to update and modernize Gandhian ideas about long term progress.
